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In a bid to win back former customers, the folks at Ubisoft have started a promotion. Titled the "Return to Shadowbane" event, the promotion will allow former subscribers to Wolfpack's MMORPG Shadowbane to try out the latest version free of charge for 30 days.

Ubisoft will accomplish this by reactiviating all expired accounts from the past six months and set them to cancelled. This will allow old subscribers to play for a free period of 30 days, after which accounts will immediately expire again so users will not have to re-cancel.

Wolfpack hopes that the major changes Shadowbane has seen in recent times will win back former customers. As stated by Producer Yitzhak:

"A lot has changed in Shadowbane over the past several months. The Shadowbane game service has greatly stabilized over the past few months, and Wolfpack Studios has made many great improvements," said Yitzhak. "What we wanted to do with this promotion is to give all the people who left Shadowbane the first time, a second chance to experience the game as it should have been originally."

Shadowbane - Return to Shadowbane Promotion

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IMG has posted a review of Fluance's AV-HTB five piece speaker set. Here's a clip from the review:

The Fluance AV-HTBs are a traditional five piece speaker set. By “traditional”, I mean they are not self-powered but need an external amplifier, such as a home theater receiver. The set consists of two front/main speakers, a center channel, and two rear/surround speakers that make up the 80-pound bundle.

What separates the Fluance speakers from other home theater box speaker sets is the rock bottom price tag. At $200, you’ll be hard pressed to find any set that offers the same specifications on paper (such as full sized floor standing mains) for anywhere in the price vicinity. I was a bit suspicious of the Fluances at first. Generally, rock bottom prices means lots of corners are cut, such as sacrificing build quality for cost. But after reading plenty of good things online I decided to give them a go.

IMG Review: Flaunce AV-HTB

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AV-HTB (add to watch list)

Freeverse has added two of their upcoming games to their web site. They include 3D Crazy Eights and Burning Monkey Casino. Both games are currently in development and should be released soon. The web pages include information on these two games as well as new screenshots.

Freeverse also announced the release of GameSmith 3.4, the company's online gaming service. New features include local or global TCP/IP support, parental lock-out, enhanced game info, significant speedups, and numerous bug fixes.

For more information, be sure to visit the Freeverse web site.

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MumboJumbo today announced the release of their new puzzle game, Equilibria. The game is available for the Macintosh and Windows. A Java version is also available through the MumboJumbo web site.

Here's more from the official press release:

Equilibria starts with a group of multi-colored marbles on a playing field. As more move in from all sides, players click groups of three or more same-colored marbles to remove them from the playing area. Special bonus marbles allow players to freeze the game for a few seconds or eliminate unwanted marbles. The goal is to maintain balance on all four sides of the playing field; if the marble mass gets too large on one side and hits the edge, the game is over.

"The best part of Equilibria is the contrast between the frantic pace and the simultaneous pursuit of balance in the gameplay," says MumboJumbo President Brian Moon. "It produces a calming effect that makes it the perfect stress reducer. Equilibria is unlike anything you've ever played before."

MumboJumbo

Brad Oliver, the programmer who recently announced that he would be leaving Westlake Interactive to join Aspyr Media has posted a farewell message on his blog. Today marks the last day of work under Westlake before moving onto Aspyr.

Here's what he had to say:

Today marks the last 24 hours I'll spend as a Westlake employee. It's been a great 5 year run, and I wouldn't trade it in for anything. That's partly why it's also a kind of depressing day - this marks the end of a pretty big and fun part of my career. Working with Glenda, Suellen, Ken, Phil, Mark, Duane, Cary, Jesse and of course John has been a blast.

When I awake later this morning, I'll start packing up that old loaner Blue and White G3 that I've had since I started work on Alpha Centauri back in 1999. It's long since been retired from day-to-day use, but I did keep it around as a way to test games on MacOS 8.6. Now that duty will fall to my iBook.

Sometime after that, I'll do one last check-in for EverQuest. Once I commit that, then my time at Westlake will be at an end, and maintenance for all the non-Aspyr projects I did (EverQuest, Civ3, Centipede and Monopoly Casino) will fall into someone else's hands.

So anyway, thanks for all the memories guys, and best of luck to you and Westlake in the future. If I ever have a job and coworkers that were as much fun as at Westlake, I'll be one of the luckiest guys alive. (Yeah, that sounded a littleLou Gehrig-like. Sue me.)

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Brad Oliver's Blog

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The now legendary Macintosh porter Ryan Gordon has updated his Finger info over at icculus.org, providing some more info on his work on the new OpenAL library for Unreal Tournament 2003 and games based on the same engine, such as America's Army. He notes that there is still more speed to gain with additional work on the library.

From his update:

I never realized we had so much mono8 data in ut2003...right now this is going through a scalar codepath, but some Altivec can clear that right up. On this 12" Powerbook, we're eating 2.5% of the CPU...this can become much faster.

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Ryan Gordon on OpenAL Improvements

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MythDevelopers, who faithfully maintain the classic real-time strategy games in the Myth series, has posted a small news update on playmyth.netsaying that they are working on updates to all three games in the series to fix some issues with MacOS 10.3 Panther the upcoming system release from Apple.

From playmyth.net

Myth II and Myth III will receive minor updates. Myth II currently has issues related to cutscene playback. Myth III currently has some minor issues dealing with texture compression. As of last night, both problems are believed to be resolved and updates will be available on October 24 at 8pm - the same time that Panther is released.

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playmyth.net: Panther Updates, Myth TFL 1.4.1

In a bit of news that may raise a few eyebrows, it's been discovered that Ubisoft's upcoming release Myst 10th Anniversary DVD collection will be both Mac and PC compatible. The collection contains Myst Masterpiece, Riven, and Myst III: Exile. While Exile is listed as OS X compatible, the other two titles are listed as running under OS 8.1/9.1.

The catch is that the DVD collection is currently only available if one pre-orders a copy of Uru: Ages Beyond Myst, which recently went gold for the PC. As Mac users probably aren't interested in pre-ordering a PC title in order to get their hands on a Mac-capable collection, we're hoping that Ubisoft will offer the DVD collection as a separate item sometime in the future.

As for news of a Mac version of Uru, Cyan has expressed an interest in pursuing the possibility, but issues due to funding and publishing are currently in the way.

Ubisoft store - Myst 10th Anniversary DVD Collection

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